The art of silk screening or screen printing has been used by printers for many decades in order to print multi-colored images on textiles. Silk screen devices typically operate by impressing an image on a garment by passing a dye soaked squeegee over a stencil with the desired image. These devices allow a myriad of multi-colored images to be imprinted through multiple passes of the squeegee while using different stencils. Also heat press units (also referred to as embossing units or press-thermoprinters) have been developed and used in garment production for printing, fusing certain materials to textiles, preparation of shirt collars and cuffs, and further such applications. Heat press units may be used in order to print images and/or to fuse objects to the garment.
Oftentimes, for the production of garments that use both silk screening and heat pressing, the garment first is placed on the silk screen device for screen printing. Then, once silk screening operations are completed, the garment is moved from the silk screening device to the heat pressing device for further operations. This multi-step procedure, however, is inefficient because a separate machine must be used for each step of the process, the machines consume valuable floor space in a production facility, the garment must be moved from machine to machine, and the garment must be re-aligned on the platen of the second machine, once it is moved. Furthermore, the lack of an integrated in-line heat press in the multi-step procedure prevents exact registration, such that the multi-step procedure is unable to achieve highly consistent results.
In order to address this inefficiency, several machines have been developed, which integrate heat pressing and silk screening into a single machine. Such devices, however, are limited to large and complicated mass-production machines. For producing samples and/or small quantities of articles, manufacturers continue to be limited to the use of multiple machines and the inefficient procedure discussed above.
Thus, there remains a long felt need in the art for a silk screening apparatus with an integrated apparatus to perform heat pressing using a single unit without the need to remove or reposition the garment.